VIM Executive Coaching is able to assist executive leaders in many ways; however, we still have not figured out “The Fortune Teller Thing.” By that we mean we cannot come up with predictions, forecasts or any prognostications as to whether an executive will go through good times or bad.
Today’s Plumbing Architect of the Year may be tomorrow’s bad bathroom designer of the decade candidate; last year’s Greatest Sports Executive of All Times Award Recipient may be hauled into court after he is accused of sexual harassment by three of his staff.
Fortunately (for us at least), most of our clients are in the middle of the problems of executive leadership life. They are good people who simply run into challenges, rough seas, shaky personnel situations or rotten luck.
Invariably, these fine folks will sit across from us and say, “I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but I’m going through a really rough time right now. I need help.”
Start with Your Breath
We can do a lot of things but we cannot change the past – or even the future. We can help you make the best of the present, and build from there. Don’t worry about how the future will be or how good or bad the past was, just breathe and let’s explore the present to the fullest. And not “the present” in general, but specifically, your role in the present of your organization.
What can help you is to better control your response to the situation, to be more authentic in the situation and to be more compassionate in the situation. How? By being more mindful in the situation.
The executive leader who might have been expecting clear sailing or a “bed of roses” upon accepting a new job, or hiring several employees, or launching a “can’t miss” software platform may “suddenly” be confronted by negatives, discord or failure. Those situations occur in life. It is how we respond to them that matters.
An angry reaction to a half-dozen key employees coming down with a virus or being accused of bribery in a foreign market or covering up the pollution numbers in a new engine will not change the situation. What can change the situation is being mindful in the moment and being authentic enough as a leader to respond to what needs to be done.
In helping executive leaders to be more mindful, we can be more able to deal with hard times and to deal with them accordingly. This is not to say that mindfulness eradicates pain. It doesn’t. Mindfulness lets one get inside the pain, study it objectively and then to act to do something about it.
No executive leader can foresee pain in a real-time sense. We can talk of probabilities, best and worst-case scenarios, throughputs and outcomes, but the true executive leader must deal with real-time catastrophes in the moment. That is where the true leadership situations occur.
End with Your Breath
In reflecting on the work life of an executive leader, we know that far too few are mindful. They will react badly in the moment to adversity, undermining their ability to lead, to inspire teams and to help the situation. They will help no one.
In every crisis, it is the leader who is mindful and responds, who will be the one to succeed. It makes no difference whether we talk of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Angela Merkel or Anne Wojcicki, the founder of 23andMe.
If the executive leader can stay within themselves, within their breath, they will ultimately thrive. Adversity is never easy, but the true leader expects it and responds.